Saturday, March 24, 2012

In his recent “literary manifesto after the end of
literature and manifestos”, the
Danish-Indian academic Lars Iyer asserted that literature nowadays was no more
than a pantomime, and a tired one at that. He called upon writers to “resist
closed forms”, to “mark the absence of Hope, of Belief, of Commitments, of
high-flown Seriousness” as well as a sense of imposture. “The end is nigh,” he
concluded. “The party’s over.”

All of this – along with a vein of dark comedy – was much
in evidence in Iyer’s first novel, Spurious
(though traditionalists would say it was more a series of linked blog posts
than an actual novel). Spurious
introduced to the world a pair of bumbling academics, the first one named Lars,
the second, simply W. Philosophers manqué,
a pair of Brods without a Kafka, they made their way through a universe facing
“end times”, with the hapless Lars being grandly insulted and upstaged by W. at
every opportunity.

The pair returns in Iyer’s new work, Dogma, with W. still firmly convinced that the end is nigh: “Our
end or the end of the world?” “Both!” Happily, his insults are as Falstaffian
as ever. He asserts that if he’s a Socrates, Lars is “a Diogenes gone mad”,
exhorting him time and again, as the policeman tells the lost wayfarer in the
Kafka story, to “give it up!” W. is also compelled to make fun of Lars’ Hindu
heritage, including one memorable occasion when, referring to a statue of
Nataraja, he mocks his luckless confrère: “What's
your cosmic dance like? It's the funky chicken, isn't it?”

Dogma is virtually without plot, but in the course of its pages,
the two embark upon a lecture tour of the United States, visiting, among other
places, Nashville and Memphis, which of course brings about much
mock-philosophizing by W. Not that all of this is without insight, such as the
statement that “capitalism is the evil
twin of true religion”. At other times, there’s laughter from the abyss:
“Philosophy is like an unrequited love affair. You get nothing back; there’s
only longing, inadequacy, a life unfulfilled”.

Abandoning their dream to “live on the fruits of America”,
the gin-quaffing team returns home, W. to Plymouth, Lars to Newcastle, where
the latter discovers an infestation of rats – a slightly forced continuation of
the situation in Spurious, where his
walls were beset by mysterious (and symbolic) damp and fungus. Nothing
deterred, Lars and W. conceive of their own dogma for presentations, inspired
by filmmaker Lars von Trier’s Dogme95 movement. With these two, however, the
dogma is simply an excuse to make up rules as they go along, with no ripples
being created in the world they seek to influence.

Soon, W. finds that his academic career in jeopardy and,
like a Continental philosopher’s version of Laurel and Hardy, or even an updated,
garrulous version of Vladimir and Estragon,
the two stagger through life as if in an “eternal waiting room”, sometimes
sinking into nihilism: “Every day is only the fresh ruination of any project we
might give ourselves…What have we learnt except that we have no contribution to
make, nothing to say, nothing to write, and that we have long since been
outflanked by the world, overtaken by it, beaten half to death by it?”

Dogma, then, is a snap of the fingers in the faces of those still
under the spell of traditional novelistic forms. As for Lars and W., there’s
another book on the way charting their further exploits. They can’t go on,
they’ll go on.

If you were to arrive at Mumbai’s Sahar airport and take a
taxi all the way to the Taj Mahal hotel in Colaba, you would travel through not
one city, but several.

There would be the city of the slums bordering the
airport, the blue tarpaulin roofs of which you would have been able to spot even
as the plane was circling above. There would then be the neighbourhoods from
Andheri to Bandra, the tony coffee shops and meretricious pubs of which would
be filled with scriptwriters, actors, models and others looking for the break to
transform their lives. If an especially chatty driver was behind the wheel of
the taxi you were in, he’d tell you of his world, of how his current occupation
was just a stop-gap before he hit the big time with a home-grown scheme or two.
After a quick glance at the rear-view mirror to assess his chances, he might
even offer to escort you to the city’s quarters of ill-repute, where, he would
affirm, you would be able to sample the pleasures of drugs or the flesh.
Shrugging off his offers, you would look out of the window to find yourself in
the area of Mumbai called “the town” by suburban commuters. Sweeping down the
Art Deco bordered sea-face to the mock Gothic buildings that still speak of
colonial solidity, you’d finally reach your destination, the hotel that, though
scarred by a recent, horrific act of terrorism, still stands as a beacon of civility
and repose.

Centuries ago, the roads you just travelled down didn’t
exist; it was a series of reclamation projects – not to mention the fortunes
that arose from trade in opium and cotton -- that unified the seven islands to create
the city you witnessed. Now, five authors of recently published books seek to
reclaim older memories and more contemporary ways of life, charting, almost in
reverse chronological order, the ages of Mumbai that made up your journey from
airport to hotel.

The Mumbai of the three decades from 1935 -- a time of
intermingling, of civility and of hospitality -- is what Naresh Fernandes brings alive in his Taj Mahal Foxtrot. Even those not alive
during those years would be nostalgic about this age of “conspicuous
cosmopolitanism”; in fact, to look at the photographs that the book is
sprinkled with is to wonder whether this really was the same city you see when
looking out of the window today.

Fernandes unearths the often-ignored legacy of the jazz
musicians who came here from the US and Europe as well as home-grown talent,
much of it from Goa. The “energetic, improvised form” of the book celebrates a
long-gone culture, chronicling visits by Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck and
others, and the rapturous reception they received – not to mention Frank
Fernand and Chic Chocolate, and the latter’s effect on Hindi film music because
of his participation in the songs of Bhagwan’s Albela.

The grand ballroom of the Taj Mahal played host to many a
memorable concert, and Fernandes also mentions other institutions, now vanished
from sight if not memory: Napoli and Bombelli’s in Churchgate, for instance. Though
the recollections are largely effervescent – such as the time when the combined
bands of Chic Chocolate and Micky Correa launched into a jaunty swing version
of Jana Gana Mana to cheering crowds at the Taj on the night of August 14,
1947 – there’s also an elegiac quality to the book. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of
America’s Jazz Age that “it was an age of
miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of
satire’, and, as TajMahal Foxtrot
makes clear, Mumbai itself experienced such an age.

It was a city, Fernandes writes in summation, “that gave
everyone the space to play their own melody the way they heard it”. Before you
can do so, he himself adds tersely: “That era has passed.” The city rode into
the Sixties on waves of rising populist agitations but optimism undimmed. This
is the Mumbai of Kiran Nagarkar’s novel, The
Extras, his follow-up to Ravan and
Eddie, and reading it is like listening to the tales told by an interesting
yet garrulous uncle reminiscing about his past. It follows the fortunes of Ram
Pawar and Eddie Coutinho as they make their way through a city teeming with
people and stories. The music they’re inspired by is not jazz but pop and rock
standards as well as, of course, Bollywood songs, initially performed in the
novel by local “brass bandwallahs”.

Life as a taxi driver, as a film extra and as a music
composer: through Ravan and Eddie’s occupations, Nagarkar paints a picture of a
city impatient to get ahead. The pace of Mumbai is already frantic: one of the
characters observes that her life is like a counter on a carom board, hurtling
from one corner to another. Nagarkar’s characters grow increasingly anxious to
break out of their ways of life at the crumbling CWD chawl in Mazagaon, as a
fictional Maiboli Sangh launches a ‘Maharashtra for Maharashtrians’ agitation
and underworld dons seek to carve out fiefdoms. That representatives of both
these types would, in years to come, scar the city forever is what you can discern
between the lines.

At one point, with trademark irreverence, Nagarkar has
Ravan muse that national integration could only truly be found on Falkland
Road, the city’s red-light district, as women of all nationalities were to be
found there. That infamous area – as your taxi driver would have informed you
-- is bordered by Shuklaji Street, where you could once discover integration of
another kind, the one forged by smoking opium. This “city of O” is what you come
across in Jeet Thayil’s debut novel, Narcopolis.
Primarily set in the Seventies, this is a hallucinatory ode to Mumbai: the
“hero or heroin” of the story.

In Narcopolis is to be found a city
wallowing in its refuse, as the narrative interweaves the lives of those such
as Dimple, a hijra with a penchant for reading; Rumi, a violent and desperate
businessman; Mr Lee, a refugee from mainland China; Dom, the narrator, who
speaks of “visitations from absent friends”, stories that are “straight from
the pipe’s mouth”; and Rashid, the owner of the opium den in which the others
congregate.

It’s a chemical
romance that begins and ends with the word “Bombay”, where all manner of
depravity arising out of addiction is on parade. When the novel moves on from
the Seventies in tracing the decline in the characters’ lives, you find an
elegy for an earlier time: “Already now there were
times when he could feel it slipping away, a way of life vanishing as he
watched, the pipes, the oil lamps layered with years of black residue, the
conversations that a man would begin and lose interest in, all the rituals that
he revered and obeyed, all disappearing.”

Narcopolis sweeps on to cover the aftermath of the bloody 1992/93
riots, “when the city killed itself” and after which the narrator begins to see
the metropolis as an “image of my cancelled self: an object of dereliction,
deserving only of pity, closed, in all ways, to the world”.

For others, though, the city represents a way to validate
the self, not to cancel it. Like Ravan and Eddie, these aspirants seek to break
into the world of film and TV; that most who pursue such dreams fall by the
wayside is no deterrent. This is the backdrop to the by-now well-known saga of
Maria Susairaj, Neeraj Grover and Emile Jerome, names gleefully pounced upon by
the tabloids just some years ago.

The tragedy is recounted with chilling exactitude in Meenal
Baghel’s Death in Mumbai. This is the
Mumbai of the 2000s, brash and unapologetic about reaching out to grasp the
brass ring, its values amoral and avaricious. It’s not an attitude that’s
spoken about when you hear the words, “the spirit of Mumbai”. The suburb of
Oshiwara and its environs, where much of the book is set, is revealed to be “an
ocean of anxious insecure, ambitious, competitive, vulnerable and often
rudderless people”.

Baghel meets those known to and touched by Grover’s murder
– friends, families, colleagues, room-mates – to create a riveting narrative.
In her hands, the affair isn’t just a triangle; it’s a polygon, with numerous
sides encompassing a murky centre.She
also talks to those such as TV and film producer Ekta Kapur and director Ram
Gopal Varma – the latter referred to as “cinema’s equivalent of an ambulance
chaser”. Stating that “crime, not Bollywood is our salutary entertainment”,
Baghel illustrates the intermingling of the two, pointing out that Love Sex Dhokha was “an edgy triptych
about sexual betrayal, cinematic aspirations and parental disapproval – themes
that deeply resonated with Neeraj’s killing.”

Death in Mumbai, then, is a well-researched cautionary tale, reportage
that reaches beyond the incident it describes. Another such example set in
another suburb of the city, Katherine Boo’s Behind
the Beautiful Forevers, is the most compelling of these books. Boo takes us
into the slum of Annawadi, bordering the international airport and in the shadow
of luxury hotels, to reveal people hanging on by their fingernails to
globalisation’s promise of a better tomorrow. As she writes, in just one of the
book’s many memorable phrases, “Annawadians now spoke of better lives casually,
as if fortune were a cousin arriving on Sunday, as if the future would look nothing like the past”. Things are bleaker with the economic
downturn: “We try so many things,” says one slum-dweller, “but the world
doesn't move in our favour”.

At first, one is reluctant to get deeper into the book:
surely, one has had one’s fill of spirited recreations of those from the slums,
especially on screen. Below this is the reluctance to engage with familiar
middle-class guilt. To overcome those qualms is to find that Boo’s book is
necessary reading: amazingly detailed, accurate and revelatory of an
“enriching, unequal world” where “anger and hope were being privatized” like
much else in the city. Corruption is everywhere; government agencies are
“operating as private market stalls not public guardians”.

The characters that populate the “undercity” of Annawadi are
a far cry from jazz musicians and star aspirants, and the only addicts here are
those who get high by sniffing discarded bottles of correction fluid. There’s
Abdul, a garbage picker accused of a horrific crime and caught up in a web of
courtroom appearances, police cells and detention centres to outrival Dickens.
There’s the ambitious Asha, who believes that politics is her way out of the
slum: “She had by now seen past the obvious truth – that Mumbai was a hive of
hope and ambition – to a profitable corollary. Mumbai was a place of festering
grievance and ambient envy”.

Though Boo’s book is more a critique of what the forces of
globalization do to the underclass than a book about Mumbai, you soon realize
that it could only have been set in this city, with an ever-growing influx of
migrants, and with political collusion and corruption leading to the
proliferation of shantytowns.

Behind the
Beautiful Forevers is not without its
moments of grim humour – a youth engaging in petty theft is referred to as a
“new economy saboteur” – but the overall picture that emerges is that of
adapting to an uncaring environment, if not downright resignation. These
slumdogs don’t want to be millionaires; they just want to lead a life more
decent than the ones they live at present.

For some, then,
it’s still a maximum city; for others, it has a minimal future. Some arrive
here hoping to find streets paved with gold; others realize that they’re filled
with no more than garbage. Whichever version of Mumbai you inhabit, from
swinging past to crumbling present, the city has always found a way, as these
five books reveal, to both surpass and confound expectations.

Sunday, March 11, 2012

In The Catcher in the
Rye, J.D. Salinger has Holden Caulfield say, “What really knocks me out is a book
that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a
terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you
felt like it”. This feeling of intimacy between author and reader is one of the
defining characteristics of Salinger’s work. As
such, a biography of the author may seem like an intrusion, a stepping into a
sacred space – more so, given Salinger’s own obsession with privacy.

In the latest such attempt, it helps to find that the
biographer, Kenneth Slawenski, counts himself as one of Salinger’s chief fans,
being the administrator of a website devoted to the man and his work. The tone
throughout, therefore, is one of respect, not to mention outright admiration.
(This is something that can be taken too far, such as when Slawenski affirms
that Salinger’s short story, ‘A Perfect Day for Bananafish’ was the inspiration
for Nabokov’s Lolita.)

Nevertheless, J.D.
Salinger: A Life Raised High is readable for the persistence with which it
takes us through the main facets of Salinger’s life – beginning with the early
ambition to become a writer, his repeated efforts to be accepted for
publication in magazines such as Saturday
Evening Post on one hand and The New
Yorker on the other, and first mentors such as editor Whit Burnett and
publisher Jamie Hamilton, both of whom he was to have a falling-out with
decades later because of the manner in which they represented his work. What
comes through time and again is Salinger’s obsession with his craft over the
years, writing to the exclusion of all else, and revising and re-revising until
he was happy with the results.

From the start, Slawenski tries to establish
correspondences between Salinger’s fiction and his life, an early example being
his pointing out that the author’s half-Jewish-half-Catholic heritage is
something shared by the fictional Glass family. Given the restrictions on
quoting from Salinger’s stories or letters, the in-depth analyses of his output
comes across as dry, bereft of the voice that Salinger strove so hard to
perfect.

However, what is riveting is the biographer’s piecing
together of Salinger’s time in the army during WWII. Starting with a relatively
quiet stint at army bases in New Jersey and Georgia, Slawenski goes on to
recreate Salinger’s participation in the bloody Normandy landing, the
liberation of Paris, the depredations during the Battle of the Bulge and – if
Slawenski’s speculation is right – the discovery of the horrors of Dachau. All
of this, he emphasizes, was to have a marked effect on Salinger, causing
him to deal with trauma by treating writing as a form of healing. He was to be
profoundly influenced by the teachings of those such as Ramakrishna Paramhansa
(calling The Gospels of Sri Ramakrishna
“the religious book of the century”) and by Zen teachings via, among other
things, his friendship with D.T. Suzuki.

With an
archivist’s glee, Slawenski traces the many short stories in which Holden
Caulfield and his siblings make an appearance, all of which – starting with
‘Slight Rebellion off Madison’ in 1941 – were to culminate in the seminal The Catcher in the Rye, published ten
years later. From this time on,
Salinger’s taste for solitude was to become even more pronounced: he was to
ensconce himself in a secluded, picturesque property in Cornish, New Hampshire,
where stayed until his death in 2010, at 91.

In Cornish, he was
to immerse himself in writing the “prose home movies” about his beloved Glass
family – the seven children of Bessie and Les, including Seymour Glass, whom
many believed was a stand-in for Salinger himself. The last of these stories, ‘Hapworth
16, 1921’, was published in the New
Yorker in 1965; from that time on, though Salinger was believed to be
writing obsessively, there’s been no new story published.

Slawenski outlines
Salinger’s well-known attempts to protect his privacy, including the court case
against Ian Hamilton to block the publication of his biography, which the
British journalist then had to recast as In
Search of J.D. Salinger. (Another often-told tale repeated here is that of
Salinger refusing Elia Kazan the rights to turn Catcher into a Broadway show, saying “I fear that Holden wouldn’t
like it”.)

The biographer’s
respectful attitude extends to Salinger’s relationships with women, from the
early liaison with Oona O’Neill -- daughter of the playwright and later wife of
Charlie Chaplin – to the ups-and-downs in his life with Claire Douglas, his
second wife, whom many believe was the template for the fictional Franny. Of
other relationships with those much younger, there’s not much said here,
barring a passing reference to Joyce Maynard, whose side of the relationship
can be found in her controversial, not-so-flattering recollection, At Home in the World.

The influence that
Salinger still exerts on authors and reader is remarkable, considering that
it’s been over two years since he died, and over 40 since any new work was
published. In a rare 1974 interview to The
New York Times, he confessed: “There is a marvelous peace in not publishing.... It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible
invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I live to write. But I write just for
myself and my own pleasure”. That pleasure was something he protected till the
very end.